Supernova Explosion in Google Earth Sky

September 17, 2007

In the year 1054, Chinese and Arab observers recorded a bright star which was later determined by astronomers to have been a supernova in the constellation of Taurus. The location is now known as the Crab Nebula. An animation showing what the event looked like was created and someone posted the animation to YouTube. Google Earth Community member Joey Wade has created a KML time animation showing portions of the video clip inside Google Earth’s new Sky mode. Simply click on the supernova KML animation and load it into Sky. Then select the right-arrow “play” button to the right of the time slider to start the animation. Here is the video used for the animation.
This is not only an interesting visualization for Sky. Joey says he is impressed with improvements in GE 4.2 in the way it handles multiple image overlays. This means time animations like this will work better, for both the normal Google Earth and Sky. Joey did something similar by creating a 3D race car video inside Google Earth.
Other interesting animations by Mr. Wade:

About Frank Taylor

Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was released. He worked in 3D graphics for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank left in 2009 to circumnavigate the earth by sailboat as part of the Tahina Expedition.

Comments

I never realized there were so many conspiracy theorists who continue to believe NASA has never landed on the Moon.
I just looked through YouTube and noticed that the majority of the videos that were uploaded from the NASA Apollo web site — are actually the conspiracy theorists!
That’s kind of interesting, and funny at the same time.

Hello Frank,
The animation of the Nebula has also been posted under blt’s thread “Crab Nebula” in the GE Community Sky Forum. http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/983174
The placemark in that thread has the animation in its correct location. The thread also has a post for an animation of the pulsar that dlt references in his initial post.
Always good to see a write up in the GE Blog.

This blog and its author are not an official source of information from Google that produces and owns Google Earth
Google and Google Earth are trademarks of Google Inc..
All image screenshots from Google Earth are Copyright Google
All other trademarks appearing here are the trademarks of their respective owners.